Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to information processing and, more particularly, to information processing apparatuses, information processing methods, and storage mediums.
Description of the Related Art
There is a technique called model fitting for estimating the position-and-orientation of a target object from a range image and a grayscale image acquired by observation of the target by use of three-dimensional shape information (registration model) about the target object. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2011-27623 discusses a technique for estimating position-and-orientation parameters by associating a geometric feature extracted from a computer-aided design (CAD) model of a component as a registration model with a geometric feature detected from a captured range image and a captured grayscale image of a target object and then using the distance between the associated geometric features as an evaluation value. With the foregoing technique for estimating the position-and-orientation of a target object, a hand position for picking a component by a robot can be calculated.
There is a reverse engineering technique for generating a three-dimensional shape model of a target object to be used for generating a registration model from range images measured from a plurality of position-and-orientations. In general, the shape reconstruction by reverse engineering includes the following operations. Specifically, the shape reconstruction includes capturing range images from different position-and-orientations a number of times using a distance measuring apparatus, removing noise from a range point group of the enormous number of range images using dedicated software, registering the range images (three-dimensional point group), curve fitting, etc. Further, there is a technique for the three-dimensional reconstruction using multi-view point images to reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a target object from an image group of the target object captured a large number of times from different position-and-orientations using a camera for capturing two-dimensional images.
In order to measure a target object a large number of times from different position-and-orientations to generate a model of the target object, the operation of moving a measuring apparatus or the target object and measuring the target object needs to be repeated a large number of times. Accordingly, the measurement requires a large amount of time and work. Furthermore, when a model has been generated after the completion of the measurement repeated a large number of times, it is often found that the measurement is not sufficient because there is an unmeasured area or because the three-dimensional shape is not accurately reconstructed due to a large amount of noise, etc. In this case, additional measurement needs to be performed, thereby requiring more time and work.